Kleiner Brahms Esoteric

The visiting Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra opened its concert at the 1967 Vienna Festival with a high-octane performance of Dvorák’s patriotic overture The Hussites. In the Brahms Violin Concerto, the elegant soloist Henry Szeryng and the conductor Rafael Kubelík entered into a musical dialogue that was both subtly sensitive and quick-witted. This release has been digitally mastered from the original tapes for optimal sound quality, and is sure to delight a whole new generation of listeners.

These recordings of live LPO concerts at Southbank Centre's Royal Festival Hall between 2008 and 2011. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2 (February 2010), received great critical acclaim including BBC Music Magazine's Disc of the Month' and the recommended version of Symphony No. 2 by BBC Radio 3's Building a Library'. The CD release of Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4 was also praised in the press, with Gramophone describing the LPO as London's finest Brahms orchestra' and The Financial Times writing that Jurowski marries the best of tradition with the best of modern practice'.

While not technically awful, Jascha Heifetz's 1955 recording of Brahms' Violin Concerto with Fritz Reiner conducting the Chicago Symphony is still close to unbearable. By 1955, Heifetz's once sinewy tone had tightened, his once supple technique had hardened, and his once warm interpretation had grown cold. With the never sinewy, supple, or warm Fritz Reiner, Heifetz creates a performance of Brahms' lyrical masterpiece that grates on the sensibilities.

One might expect Andrew Manze's interpretations of Johannes Brahms' four symphonies to adhere to ideas of the movement for historically informed performance practice, due to his scholarship and dedication to authenticity in his early music performances. However, and somewhat paradoxically, he and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra have delivered more or less mainstream readings on modern instruments; there are no signs of late 19th century woodwind or brass timbres, and the strings play with standard vibrato. Yet Manze's historical fact finding has gone to a deeper level than just replicating instrumentation or orchestral scale, and he has found numerous clues to Brahms' intentions in the composer's transcriptions of the symphonies for two pianos, which often vary with the published orchestral scores in accentuation, tempo indications, and phrasing. These are fine points that can be discerned with careful listening and great familiarity with many other recordings of the symphonies, both conventional and historic, but they may not be the main thing listeners will consider in appreciating this set. The playing and the recording quality are up to the extraordinarily high levels set by CPO in all its releases, and these resilient works sound as good as they ever did under any other conductor.

Brahms’s two sonatas for clarinet and piano, Op 120, composed in 1894, were followed only by the four Serious Songs and a set of organ chorale preludes (some of which may have been written at earlier times). His farewell to chamber music was also his farewell gift to the clarinet.

The Cleveland Orchestra is the "aristocrat among American orchestras" (The Telegraph), and the ensemble's music director Franz Welser-Most, leads them with verve and precision. These three discs from Belvedere (DVD and Blu-ray) feature six and a half hours of music, presenting a cycle of all the major orchestral works of Johannes Brahms. Included are the complete Symphonies and Piano Concertos, the Violin Concerto, the Tragic Overture, the Academic Festival Overture, and the Haydn Variations. Soloists include violinist Julia Fischer and pianist Yefim Bronfman.

World-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his longtime collaborator, pianist Emanuel Ax, are joined by violinist Leonidas Kavakos in their first recording together of all three of the piano trios of Johannes Brahms. Ma and Ax have built together a distinguished catalogue of Brahms recordings, but this is their first recording of the Piano Trios and their first collaboration with Kavakos.

Originally released between 1976 and 2007, the offerings in this eight-CD box set represent Maurizio Pollini's exemplary concerto recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, including all of Ludwig van Beethoven's cycle, the two piano concertos by Johannes Brahms, and six of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's masterpieces in performances that rank among the pianist's finest.